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New submitter beefsack writes "Thanks to the strong ARM support in the Ubuntu repositories, Ubuntu, along with Lubuntu and others have been ported to work on the new MK802 mini PC. Performance is very impressive, especially given that Mali GPU driver support in Linux is still lacking features such as hardware video decoding."

The link alone should tell you what the device is. Price per unit is supposed to be $74, not quite RasPi class.

This seems a bit expensive, considering that one can buy a 7" Allwinner/Mali-based tablet like the Ainol 7 Elf for very little more, with a touchscreen etc. I can't really understand why anyone would bother with this.

They wholesale on Alibaba for $50 [alibaba.com]. I assume you could probably obtain them for even less shopping around that site. In some respects these are more attractive than Raspberry PI since they have 512MB or 1GB ram and 4 GB storage and come with case and cables. On the flip side I doubt they're ever going to be as well supported by the community or manufacturer and it may be the hardware codecs remain locked up.

To me, personally what the 'pi has always represented is a arduino replacement and hence while i'm very into arm and tech in general, i've never really been able to get into it given that its only got 256mb of ram. For a while i had this idea in my head of building a vps style system out of small arm boards and the 'pi just isnt going to cut it. The CPU in the thing is probably decent for some applications but there just not enough ram.

Calxeda are now doing just that (with hp) and now dell are getting into

People are already working on getting OpenELEC (Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center) to work on these, which will make these a wicked entertainment center given that this means XBMC on the cheap. I look forward to seeing these popular up in the houses of every day Joes being put together by their geek friends.

What I'd like to see is a method of running XBMC as shell and allow Android games to be launched from within the interface. Should provide a library of games that way, especially if it could be made to pair with cellphones as controllers. Seems like everybody has a cellphone these days so it should make having controllers for everyone easier.

Would OpenELEC enable hardware video decoding? The summary says it's not supported, and without that it'll be pretty useless for video replay. Software decoding is too jittery.

That's being worked on. There is a thread on XBMC's forums [nyud.net] with the various attempts to get these types of devices working. Some are closer to success than others. Last I heard the Allwinner A10 SOC driver code were released but the developers wanted to make sure they had written legal permission to use them. (Previously the code

I have a 7" NATPC using an AllWinner A10 chip running ICS. Cost of device $90 or less on places like EBay. Mostly it runs pretty well but it definitely suffers from not being dual core since there are times related to background activity when performance takes a dump. It's still capable of running most Android games pretty smoothly though.

The RPi folks claim good performance for media decoding & 3D games, but I haven't heard any big claims about CPU-heavy stuff. Most of the RPi chip is the VideoCore processor, with only a tiny sliver of an ARM hanging off the side.

The aside about the Pi was because prior to the launch I mentioned in one forum how crap desktop performance would be and a guy with access to a preview board claimed it was good. Then lo and behold it turns out desktop performance is pretty crap which is entirely predictable considering the lack of RAM, the IO constraints, low clock speed, single core etc.. You *could* use it as a desktop, depending on your patience but it would be a borderline experience even with the lightest of window managers and apps.

Ubuntu is a resource hog and IMHO sucks in general, but to each their own. Debian ARM or Archlinux ARM would be a much better choice.

I feel like this ubuntu bandwagon thing is more for n00bs and people who don't want to set everything up themselves...perhaps Canonical is somehow associated with the US government or something, and wants to get their foot in the door of most Linux users as well...

Either way...not a good use of resources, IMHO, when something like Debian or Arch would've been much more e